


forever (never means)

by fnowae



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: (Characters), :), Angst, Gen, Transphobia, Vandays, trans girl character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-05-01 18:25:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14526507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fnowae/pseuds/fnowae
Summary: Four girls, one van, and too much blood between them.





	forever (never means)

**Author's Note:**

> so I wrote this in one class period. thanks to the chem sub for giving no shits I guess?
> 
> this is. a lot. but wow! it sure is decent!
> 
> this is set in an au which has its own blog - it’s inactive since people stopped interacting with it, but if you wanna hit up @transgirlfob on tumblr and send some asks...I’m not stopping you
> 
> enjoy :)

No one is particularly surprised when Ricky shows up to the van two hours after the show’s over with a bruise over her eye and a gash down her right arm. 

“Ricky,” Jo says, helping her into the van without hesitation, “you can’t keep doing this.”

Ricky eyes the scab over Jo’s elbow and the matching bruises on either side of her jaw and decides she doesn’t need to point out the obvious. Instead, she simply says, “they were talking about Payt.”

“ _Good_ ,” comes Payt’s voice from the driver seat. “At least it wasn’t someone else.”

“Payt,” Ricky protests, trying hopelessly to fish for justification, “you should’ve heard-“

“I’m sure I’ve heard worse about all of us,” Payt mutters. The van starts up, and Ricky can’t respond over the noise of the rickety engine that really should’ve busted months ago. She just sighs and leans back against the seat.

Jo scoots closer to her, now clutching a roll of pinkish gauze and a red towel. (The gauze has always been that color. The towel, though, was white once.) 

“You can’t keep doing this,” she repeats as she wipes the blood off Ricky’s arm and starts to wrap it. When she rolls up her sleeves, she reveals countless more marks and lacerations, all black and blue and red, and Ricky still knows better than to say anything about them. 

“I can’t let them get away with this, either.” Ricky grimaces as Jo tightens the gauze against her open wound. The blood keeps leaking through. She keeps on wrapping it.

“Everything okay back there?” Andy asks, peeking around the edge of the passenger seat worriedly. Jo sighs. 

“I don’t know,” she says, before Ricky can answer, “the cuts aren’t usually this bad.”

“‘e got me with a piece of pipe,” Ricky murmurs, eyes trailing to the ground. Still-wet drops of her blood layer on top of everyone else’s, dried and dark against the black seats, but she still knows it’s all there. 

Jo cringes, and Andy looks back to the road, but neither of them say anything. There’s been worse and they all know it. 

“Here’s good for the night,” Payt announces, parking the van and turning it off. They’re in a tiny back alley, and it’s not the ideal place to sleep, but they’ve become accustomed to dark corners and side streets and watching out the window for anyone who might be following them. 

“Where are we going tomorrow?” Andy asks, always the reasonable one. Jo cuts off the gauze and finishes tying it around Ricky’s arm. It’s tight but it’s going to work and the last thing Ricky needs right now is to go to the hospital.

“Same city,” Payt answers, reclining her half-broken seat as far as it will go until it could nearly pass for some semblance of comfort, if you squinted. She doesn’t need to say that none of them even know what this city is anymore, really. There’s been too much blood in too many places and they’ve all started to melt into one. 

“Off day, then?” Ricky asks, but she knows it never is, really. Off days are less picking fights in dark alleys and more hoping no one is idiot enough to pick them in broad daylight instead. 

“Off day,” Payt agrees. “I think we can afford an actual lunch. I heard there’s good Mexican a couple blocks from here.”

The silent murmurs of agreement are the last sound before one by one, they all drift off to sleep. 

///

The days get better until Ricky’s arm stops throbbing and her bruise goes away, and then it all goes to shit again. 

Ricky doesn’t chastise Payt when she shows up three hours and a bruised rib too late. She never does. She’s on gauze duty this night - it’s blue this time, they ran out of the pink on her arm - and she just pushes up Payt’s shirt and begins wrapping her injury without questioning. She isn’t sure if you’re even supposed to bandage a bruised rib. She’s in over her head and she knows it, but there’s no better option. 

Jo, who still hasn’t gotten the “we handle our own injuries” rule fully into her head, catches sight of Payt in the back and goes pale. “ _Payton_ ,” she says shakily, “we can’t fix that. Shouldn’t we g-“

“ _No_.” Payt stares darkly down at the floor. “No hospital, you _know_ that.”

The hospital has been banned since the first time Ricky broke a bone and they learned quickly that they can’t pay for that shit, and also that getting treatment without giving a legal name simply isn’t possible. (Most of them hold to the opinion that the second problem is the worse one.) After that, they learned well enough how to fix their own shit, or at least how to try, and they’ve been mostly okay since. 

“Right,” Jo mutters, but she still sounds worried. “I know.”

Payt inhales shakily and cringes. Ricky suddenly remembers when her mom forced her to take a first aid class in eighth grade, and she’s pretty sure they taught her that you’re supposed to call 911 if it hurts to breathe. But she knows Payt will be okay, she always is, so she just ties off the gauze and sits back. 

“You’ll be okay,” she lies. 

“I know,” Payt lies back. 

///

Andy is not riled up easily. 

Even though she’s the most formidable of the four, she doesn’t get into fights too often, and when she does, it’s for good reason. 

When she stumbles back into the van with blood dripping down her face and chest, she won’t say what was said, and Ricky thinks that’s probably for the best. 

Ricky is driving this time, trying to find a place to sleep, but there’s an old Cadillac that’s been driving behind them for too long through streets that are too secluded, and she doesn’t want to stop just yet. Her hands shudder on the wheel each time she turns back and sees how horrible Andy looks, so she decides it’s best if she stops looking back. 

Jo is next to her, in the passenger seat, and unlike Ricky, she doesn’t stop looking. She looks terrified. She probably should be. But even she knows not to suggest the hospital this time. 

Payt has the gauze - a sickly yellow floral patterned roll this time - and she’s wincing every time she shifts the wrong way, but no one dares mention that her rib should have healed by now. It joins the hospital and whatever someone said to Andy on the list of things they will never mention again. 

Ricky turns through an alley. The Cadillac turns after them. Ricky is starting to think stopping to sleep for the night isn’t an option this time. 

When she hears sobbing from the back, Ricky does her best to pretend she doesn’t know it’s Andy. Andy never cries. The concept of her actually doing it is too scary to think about. So Ricky pretends, even though the sound doesn’t match at all, that maybe it’s just Payt. 

Ricky turns out of the alleyway and flicks on the radio. It drowns out the sobs, but it doesn’t stop the car behind them. Good enough, Ricky supposes. It’s good enough. 

Good enough, she realizes with a jolt, is all they’ve ever gotten. 

///

Jo gets into fights the most, but she never lets anyone know about it. She’s covered with more bruises and scrapes and scars than any of the rest of them, but somehow she’s never back too late, and she never complains or needs someone to bandage them. 

Ricky’s alone in the van when Jo gets there. She isn’t even late - in fact she’s so not late that Andy and Payt haven’t even made it back yet. But she’s shaking a little and as much as she tries to hide it by turning her head away, Ricky can tell her eye is swollen shut and her lip is split open. 

“Jo,” Ricky starts, but Jo just shakes her head as she pushes herself back into the van’s far corner. Ricky sighs and goes for the towel. 

“No, no, ‘m good,” Jo murmurs, pushing herself further until she’s all balled up in one corner. Ricky doesn’t listen. She moves closer, and Jo shudders harder. 

“I don’t need that,” she insists, but Ricky wipes up the blood dripping down her chin anyway. 

“Press it on the cut,” she instructs, and Jo does so reluctantly. Ricky takes a brief look at Jo’s bruised eye, but there’s not much she can do about that, so she just hopes it will heal soon. 

Ricky stays close to Jo, making sure she keeps pressure on the wound, and after a while she ends up shoulder to shoulder with her bandmate, her deep breaths coming in unison with Jo’s shaky, weak ones. 

Ricky is about to say that the bleeding should have stopped by now when Jo whimpers and suddenly blurts out, “I don’t want to have to do this anymore.”

Ricky is surprised, not expecting Jo to actually talk about any of this. None of them ever do. It’s like an unspoken agreement. But now that Jo’s started it, Ricky knows she can’t stop it. 

“I know,” she says, “and I don’t either.”

“But we have to,” Jo continues. A tear trails down her cheek and mingles with the drying blood on her chin. “We have to because we can’t just - we can’t just let them-“ She whimpers again, shaking her head. “Ricky, I - I don’t even care if it’s about me. But when they start talking about you and Payt and Andy I can’t-“ She pauses to inhale and exhale, shaking as she does. “They were talking about Payt,” she finally says. “I can’t even - I can’t even say what they called her but it was nothing good and I wouldn’t have cared if it was me but fuck, fuck Ricky, none of you _deserve_ this.”

“You don’t either,” Ricky tells her softly. 

“Fuck,” Jo says, curling in further on herself. Ricky lifts a hand to her shoulder even though she knows it won’t help at all. It’s the least she can do. 

“It’s going to stop,” Ricky says, and it comes out with more certainty than she’s meant for it to. “It’s going to stop someday. We’re going to make it big and then they’ll be scared to throw those words at us and you won’t have to fight anymore. We’ll be okay.”

“We’re not making it anywhere,” Jo says bitterly. “You know we’re not. You know no one’s ever going to want to listen to four fucking-“ Her voice cuts off, crumbles into another whimper, and she curls up tighter until Ricky can’t see the blood on her face anymore. 

“They will,” Ricky insists, “they will, because there will be people who don’t care, and we just haven’t found them yet. They’re out there, Jo, I promise they are, and they’ll find us and believe in us and the thing is, we just have to do that _first_.”

Jo breathes in, out, in, out, shudders, and then looks up, meeting Ricky’s eyes. Her face is damp and crusted with red and she’s scared and shaky but she is _hopeful_. “Do you really believe that?” she asks carefully, eyes wide and fucking _hoping_ and it feels like everything might be okay again. 

“Of course,” Ricky replies. “Of course I do.”

Jo nods and she’s crying again but this time the tears are _hopeful hopeful hopeful_ and she’s grinning through them and Ricky is too because she really, really believes that. Things will get better. She knows they will. 

Jo is still bruised and bleeding and Payt’s rib still hasn’t healed right and maybe tomorrow they’ll get in another fight, but sometime, maybe soon, maybe not, it won’t be like this anymore. Ricky smiles despite herself as Jo tumbles into her arms because they’re both scarred and crying but Ricky makes a promise to herself that night in the corner of their rickety old van that shouldn’t work anymore at all. This won’t be forever. 

It’s a promise she intends to keep.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading !
> 
> if you liked this you should leave kudos and a comment, and hit up that blog! 
> 
> thank you!!


End file.
